The Japanese phrase, “okyakusama wa kamisama desu”, loosely translated into English as “Customer is God”, was perhaps coined to emphasize the centricity of the customer’s role in Business Organisation’s quest for an invincible strategy to drive growth and expansion. It is indeed an open secret that the organisations cannot sail through the choppy water of market uncertainties without the safe boat of compelling value proposition for its customers.
In the strenuous journey of corporate world experiences, it is not a surprise to meet a few hot headed customers who believe in the above mentioned phrase rather literally. Their prophetic proclamation seems like the word of God revealed to them in the darkness of the mysterious night. At times I wonder , why this phrase which is meant to respect the esteemed customer’s point of view, at times used by them to evince/establish their supremacy over their service providers. Under the aegis of this assumed Godly power, their style changes from collaborating to dictating which brings the avoidable elements of aggression in the interactions that ultimately ends up spoiling the recipe of the meaningful engagement.
Etiquettes of responses
The question of the appropriateness of the responses to these unwanted situations may be baffling and bothering to many of us who are committed to provide Best in Class services to their customers. For managers, dealing with this quagmire of confusion gets more difficult when the tone and tenor of the customer’s communication crosses the boundaries of the generally agreed professional etiquettes. They feel like having a sort of Hobson’s choice between the risk of losing customer and the possible danger of losing their own self-esteem under constant hammering.
It is important to understand and underline that at times the customer’s frustration may be absolutely genuine despite the inappropriateness of the ways of voicing the concerns.
Perhaps, there is no standard answer and “One-Size-Fir-All” solution available to manage the unpleasantries that might crop up, however organisations can create the principle values based framework for the managers to deal with these complexities of the engagement.
Every individual has its own style of responding to the pleasant and unpleasant situations of the lives. Below is the some of the nuggets of learning that I collected over a period of time from the labyrinth of corporate corridors that might help to deescalate and sort the concerns in more realistic ways.
- Defining the boundaries - For any professional engagement, boundaries in terms of the behavioural expectations based on the ethics and values should be clearly defined. A line must be drawn for both sides and breach of the same should be avoided under any circumstances.
- Listen and Understand- Give a patient listening to customer and understand their perspectives even if it is based on the perception not the hard facts.
- Clarity and Transparency – Clarity and transparency in communication is critical while responding to the conflicting issues. Most of the time customers do have the tendency to make the big, generic statement to assert their opinion while expressing their displeasure. As a service provider, presenting the specifics with the contextual and objective point of view is critical. A good number of managers, deliberately keep the conversation ambiguous and hide the key information hoping that it would save the relationship. Dare to call spade a spade.
- Don’t beat around the bushes - Accepting your mistake without any string attached to it and agreeing on the corrective action is a right way to address the discordance. The verbal skullduggery and smart tricks to cover mistakes is a bad choice that would erode the trust further.
- Build long term relationship– It is much easier to manage the customer’s concerns and address the complicated situations, if the long term trust based relationship exists with the them. It requires leadership connect from both sides at periodic interval to create and review long term vision and roadmap of the engagement. This can only happen if services providers can create compelling value proposition for customers.
- Cost of Bad Relationship - Service providers must evaluate the cost of bad engagement vis-à-vis good and no engagement. Though the endeavour should always be to provide the Best in Class services but there can be situations where cost of bad engagement is much higher than revenue generated from the project and the possibility of reversing the trend is very slim. Exiting from such engagements in such unfortunate situations even though it does not sound nice, is a wise thing to do.
Managing customer expectation is challenging but it is critical for any business to thrive in a competitive environment. The above mentioned difficulty, gets more nuanced and knotty in the "Professional Services" Industry as the contours of expectations often does not fit in the boundaries of the agreed framework. I often believe that the philosophy of “Customer is God” is a bit exaggerated specially in the context of the professional services.
In my view, cornerstone of the customer relationship is empathy and value creation for the customers – perhaps that’s only way to create win-win situation for both parties to sustain and thrive.
